Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

If you have installed Leopard and want to be able to upload files but at the same time debug your Flash and Flex applications you can find the debug versions of the prerelease player (that has the file upload fix) in the Flex 3 SDK nightly builds, just download, unzip and look in the “runtime” directory.

This wasn’t obvious to me, and I spent a long time hunting it down. I hope this comes to use the next time someone googles for leopard debug flash player.

Edit Since 10.5.1 came out, this became a little less useful. Go with the release version for development instead of using the nightlies.

I have just discovered that my broadband provider Comhem has ripped me off (Comhem lurade mig pÃ¥ pengar)*. Instead of lowering their prices, they invented a new service identical to the one I had, and made it possible to “upgrade” to that service for free. And then they didn’t tell me about it. I found out by randomly looking at their homepage, trying to find information about how to change my adress.

Finally, someone said it. There is a huge problem in the IT industry today, namely businesses using open source frameworks and making huge revenues, without a cent going to the authors of those frameworks. Rich Green of Sun likens it to “Robin Hood backwards”.

60 requests before you can actually click on anything, and almost 700 requests before it tells you that a search for “adobesucks” didn’t yield any results – and searching for “MovieClip” aparently loads just as much. It’s over 2 Mb of data, and only 10 Kb of it is cacheable.

It’s a good thing the ActionScript 3.0 and Flex API docs are generated by ASDoc and are not accessed through LiveDocs, otherwise I would go mad.

I’m going to London in April, and as the environmentally aware person I am, I would prefer not to fly. The problem is that I live in Gothenburg, Sweden, which isn’t connected to the British isles in any way. Really, it’s not far, but there are a few obstacles in the way – look at a map and you’ll understand. Ferry would be ideal, but the last connection was shut down a year ago – outcompeted by RyanAir. So what am I to do?

I got a weird idea and started googling all the letters of the alphabet to see which pages had managed to SEO themselves into the top position. The results are quite interesting — well, to be honest, some are boring, but perhaps half are surprises — and you can see some trends: W3C specifications and Wikipedia entries for letters are common, if not on the top position then in the first page. Also Google has trouble with apostrophes, so the top hits for the letter s are all companies with names ending in ‘s. Jennifer Lopez is the only person who makes it to the list, but when I re-checked the results today (I did the initial searches yesterday) she had been bumped down to fifth place for the letter J. She’s still in my list because I kept all the data from the first run, and it would be a shame to remove the only person.

There was some rumors some weeks back that Apple was going to release Safari on Windows. I didn’t pay any attention to it then, but it struck me the other day that it’s quite likely. Perhaps not Apple releasing Safari, but someone releasing a WebKit-based browser for Windows — because really, Safari is more or less just a shell on top of WebKit.

I can even give you a when: as soon as Adobe releases Apollo.

Apollo will be built on top of WebKit, so WebKit has already been ported to Windows (which couldn’t be very hard, since it came from KDE to start with) and writing a fancy web browser UI in Apollo should be easy as cake.

I have started to play with ActionScript 3 and the command line mxmlc compiler (which is free, horray). Adobe has posted some interesting libraries on labs which I’m interested in trying out. When you download the frameworks you get three things, the compiled swc, the source and the documentation.

Except you don’t.

You don’t get any documentation. What you get is the generated API “documentation”, which is like throwing a gadget without any visible clues as to how it’s operated in someones face and say “you figure it out”.

Its such a waste of good code! Some of the frameworks have tens of classes in them, how do I know which ones to use? I’ll have too look through everything just to get an idea of what it can do.

A simple “this is the bare minimum of code you need to do X” would suffice, from there I can experiment my way to understanding the whole framework.

If you are going to distribute a framework or library, at least include an example of the most common usage of the framework. If you can’t bother doing that, don’t bother releasing it.

Luckily there seems to be (more or less) third-party guides to some of the frameworks, so I’ll get by. It still makes me disapointed, however.